The Finkler Question

by Howard Jacobson

Hephzibah Weizenbaum smelt like that – of car fumes, and crowds of tourists, and the Euphrates where it all began.

The smile enveloped him, like the warm waters of a pool buoying up a swimmer.

She had a warm voice, like melted chocolate. She was probably full of chocolate, Treslove thought. Normally fastidious about fat, he decided it looked good on her, swathed out of sight as it was.

Words had numeric significance for Finklers, he’d read that somewhere. And even the name of God was a pun on something else. No

It’s not who says it, or what it means, but how you say it, and in what company.

You keep the big unequivocal words for the big unequivocal occasions,

It declares, inter alia, that we have a) made up our minds about what we think, b) closed our minds to what others think, and c) chosen to go on hearing nothing with which we happen to disagree.’

had he kept her beauty alive in his eyes by feasting on it every day? And if so, did that make her beauty illusory?

She shifted in her chair. Gracefully. And shook her hair. Grey, but not an elderly grey. Grey as though it were a colour of her choosing.

Libor had been lucky in love but in politics he was from a part of the world that expected nothing good of anybody. Jew-hating was back – of course Jew-hating was back. Soon it would be full-blown Fascism, Nazism, Stalinism. These things didn’t go away. There was nowhere for them to go to. They were indestructible, non-biodegradable. They waited in the great rubbish tip that was the human heart.

and so it goes…

Don’t think of it as counselling or therapy. Think of it as conversation.

They were interpreters of genius. They showed what could be done with sound.

Stop looking and you stop being alive.

He wondered if her ability to make him imagine her without clothes, though she was covered from her neck to her ankles and never made a movement that was remotely suggestive, was part of her bereavement counselling technique.

She did not sorrow for him. She left him to sorrow for himself.

the heart did not speak, that was why. Because language presupposes artificiality. Because in the end there was nothing, absolutely nothing, to be said.

Mamzer is Yiddish for bastard. Treslove can’t stop using the word. Even of himself. Am I lucky mamzer or what am I? he asks.

‘That’s what Hephzibah means in Hebrew,’ Finkler told him. ‘My delight is in you.’

Hephzibah didn’t so much cook as lash out at her ingredients, goading and infuriating them into taste.

like Vulcan stoking the fires of Etna. And at the end of it, there was an omelette and chives for Treslove’s supper.

Finkler breathed in the odours of Hephzibah’s devastated kitchen – had the Cossacks been through they’d have left it tidier – and said, ‘Ahhhh! My favourite.’ ‘You don’t even know what I’m preparing,’ Hephzibah laughed. ‘Still my favourite,’ Finkler said.

‘A halber emes izt a gantser lign,’ he said. ‘A half truth is a whole lie,’ Hephzibah whispered to Treslove.

‘I knew it,’ Finkler said when he got to the cholent. ‘Helzel! I knew I could smell helzel.’ Treslove knew it, too, but only because Hephzibah had told him. Helzel was stuffed chicken neck. In her opinion, no cholent could call itself a cholent without helzel. Finkler clearly thought the same.

Everything was different. Before Hephzibah he had eaten only with his mouth. Now he ate with his whole person. And it took many paper napkins to keep his whole person clean.

‘I wonder whether we feel nothing,’ Finkler said, ‘precisely because we rehearse our feelings on the subject too freely and too often.’ ‘Crying Wolfowitz, you mean?’ Hephzibah said with a wild laugh.

She didn’t believe they had to clean up after every excess. There wasn’t a price to pay for pleasure.

Since you don’t know where you’re going to be tomorrow, or indeed whether you’re going to be alive or dead, why worry over dishes?

Some things you cannot acquire. You have to be born and brought up a Jew to see the hand of Jews in everything. That or be born and brought up a Nazi.

he wore a PLO scarf which he would wind around his face, like a warrior going into battle, before putting on his helmet and roaring off on his bike.

‘Oh, I make a point of never looking there,’ she told him when he at last mentioned what he’d been watching for the last however many weeks. She made the place sound like Sodom, which one cast an eye over at one’s peril.

It looked like one of those books which you started as a child and finished in an old persons’ home lying in a bed

you insist on understanding it. You should try just living it.’

He is all along saying more than he appears to say. We plough the same furrow, he and I.’

A woman shouldn’t be married to a totally faithful man all her life.’ ‘Why not?’ ‘It demeans her.’ Treslove blushed again, this time for himself. ‘I don’t understand that, Libor,’ he said. Libor kissed his cheek and said no more.

compassion fatigue,

‘My dear wife’s parents,’ he said, ‘who must have had something good in their souls or they would not have produced her, were contemptible people.

‘Me? I believe in believing nothing.’

You win by understanding something of what the other side thinks, and they understood nothing.

in jealousy a feeling is a reason.

When you love a woman deeply you are bound to imagine that every other man must love her deeply too.

‘Is it like being gay? Is there a Jewdar that enables you to pick one another out?’

Ha!

‘The place everything we fear comes from. The place where we store our longing for the end of things.’

people who expect the worst will always see the worst.’

You don’t judge fidelity by every act; it’s the desire to say you’re faithful and the desire to be believed.’

an indiscretion needn’t matter. It’s the overall intention of fidelity that counts.’

I don’t want the burden of the knowledge.

if you don’t go to the theatre whenever you don’t like the sound of a play, when do you ever go to the theatre?

Bathrooms always made him angry. They were places that returned him to himself. Illusionless, he looked in the mirror. They’ve ceded their sense of outrage, he said to his reflection, washing his hands.

There were people who claimed that the paranoid create the thing they fear.

‘Come out and play,’ he said. But Finkler wasn’t in the mood. ‘I have of late,’ he said, ‘lost all my mirth.’